Claude Levi-strauss, 100, Pioneer In Anthropology

November 4, 2009|By Thomas H. Maugh II Tribune Newspapers

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday of natural causes at his home in Paris.

He was 100.

Part philosopher and part sociologist, he studied tribes in Brazil and North America. Towering over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and 1970s, he founded the school of thought known as structuralism, which holds that common features exist within the enormous varieties of human experience. Those commonalities are rooted partly in nature and partly in the human brain.

He concluded primitive peoples' myths all tend to provide answers to such universal questions as "Who are we?" and "How did we come to be in this time and place?"

His conclusions about the role of mythology were elegantly expanded in a series of books that included Tristes Tropiques, The Savage Mind and Mythologiques.